


A Part of Himself

by NavyGreen



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Bard can't read but that's okay, Elf Lore, Elvish Magic, Fluff, Gen, M/M, Nighttime talks, Short & Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 04:47:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28504722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NavyGreen/pseuds/NavyGreen
Summary: Bard, ever the thoughtful, hard-working, yet unwilling representative of New Dale, has not found the time to sleep. The Elvenking, thoughtful, hardworking, and alarmingly perceptive, takes notice of this.
Relationships: Bard the Bowman & Thranduil, Bard the Bowman/Thranduil, bard of laketown - Relationship
Comments: 3
Kudos: 59





	A Part of Himself

Within a small part of himself, a part he liked to ignore, Bard was unsurprised at the presence of the Elvenking at his door.

His presence, in general, was nothing special – to an extent. Three days of meetings, writings, and strategy, in which Dain, King Under the Mountain, the Elvenking, and Bard – who was decidedly _not_ a King, thank you very much – sat in luxurious tents and dingy, recently-reinhabited buildings. Hours of speaking, of Bard pretending to comprehend the writings set in front of him, of letting his eyes, lined with purple, flicker towards the Elf always sat on his right, only to find the King’s heard turned away from the table, slightly – towards him. As if to hear an almost-silent whisper.

Bard would shift, feeling the harsh corners of his chair suddenly, and force his eyes downcast, to stare at the symbols and scratching that meant as much to him as it would an intelligent dog.

He often felt like one – tugged around, neck pulled on as he was guided this way and that, told to _sit_ and to _speak_ , to _catch_ and _come_.

 _At least a dog gets to rest,_ he thought bitterly, unmoving from his desk. The candle perched on the corner of the dark oak flickered, wax melting down its pale side. Cooled pools sat hardened around its base, obscuring patches of scattered papers, feeble drawings of Bard’s own hand that resembled his youngest’s recreations of the world around her, rather than the complex strategies and reconstruction ideas he had attempted to copy down.

A moment of quiet, of divine silence, washed over him. Perhaps, if he focused enough, Bard could simply fall asleep-

The door rattled against its rusted hinges with the force of the knock, as gentle as it was. Still, it was much louder – more _insistent_ – than the purposeful scuff of a boot’s sole against worn wood he had heard but a few moments ago.

Bard huffed, air gathering and shoving the candle’s flame to the edge of its wick, only for it to spring back, unbothered and forgiving. He stood, chair legs scraping harshly against the stone of the floor. If the Elvenking hadn’t known he was awake previously – which he _most certainly did_ , damn the hearing of Elves – he did now.

“Coming,” he muttered anyway, voice hoarse with a mixture of sleeplessness and disuse.

For all the meetings he attended, Bard’s spoken words were few and far between. He couldn’t even blame the battle of wits and insults between the Elvenking and King Under the Mountain – though lightning-fast, enough that Bard couldn’t get a word in if he tried, he didn’t. Every time attention was drawn towards him, whether it be with a glance, a shove of parchment towards him, or a directed cough, Bard felt his throat close, tongue grow too large and his mind pause, like a plough horse stopping its work in the fields to glance up at the air. His chest would tighten. And tighten, until a muttered word or agreed grunt was forced from its cavity, and attention was turned away.

Bard, after all, was not a Man meant for the complexities and expectations of a noble – no matter what his blood spoke. Nor the Elvenking.

Speaking of.

“I know that look,” the Elf spoke when Bard opened the door.

Down the hall, two guards standing by the front door to Bard’s building (which he refused to call a home – his had burnt and sunk under the lake, along with almost everything with it. Besides, Marilla wouldn’t have stood for the carpet set by his bed) kept their helms slightly tilted in their direction. Listening. Bard couldn’t’ blame them – not much in terms of entertainment during the cold nights of New Dale. He would do the same in their situation. Except, he wasn’t – he had an Elvenking at his door instead.

“Do you also know the hour?” Bard replied with a stiff edge. He kept the door open a chest-width, foot planted firmly in the centre of the gap.

The Elf’s eyes flicked over Bard’s shoulder to his desk. Minutely, his brows pulled together, pinched. However, his face returned to its usual state within a moment. “Do you?”

Bard huffed, jaw clenched. _Why have you graced me with your presence, my lord?_ he should’ve said. “Why are you here?” he mumbled instead. Though his mind, trained to understand some semblance of diplomacy after the previous days, scolded him for his behaviour, his tongue and throat found no agreement.

The Elf appeared amused, however. The corners of his thin lips perked up for a few moments, perhaps more exaggerated and purposeful than a proper Elf’s smirk should be. “I’ve come to visit.”

 _Oh really? Hm? Never would’ve thought, my_ lord.

“Well, I’m quite busy being representative-”

“King,” the Elf interjected.

“-of Dale-” Bard paused and scowled. “ _Representative_ of Dale. I will not be a King of a people who have not chosen me.”

The Elvenking waved his hand, gesturing to nothing in particular in the mysterious way of his kind. “But they have. Quite audibly.”

Bard brought a hand up to rub his brow. Beneath his fingers a dull ache made itself known, growing with each moment. “Because there is none better.”

A smile. Equal mixes of smug agreement, and something only found in foxes nearing the end of a hunt. “That’s something we can agree on.”

Hook, line, and sinker.

Bard sighed, and imaged his breath stealing away from him and rising above his head like bubbles. “Why are you here?” he repeated.

The smile was dropped, and Bard was reunited with the serious façade found most often at the war table. Thranduil’s voice lowered, though his spine remained straight, and he continued to loom over Bard despite their only head-sized height difference. “I’ve heard you’re unwell… come to check on you.”

Bard paused. One moment. Another.

He felt much like fish – not yet pulled from the water, but rather having just recently gobbled down a metallic hook. A jab of pain. A previous calm quickly deteriorating into fear. His gut flipped, mimicking the fish attempting to free its gill. But Bard knew very few escaped – if not for the fisher cutting the line. Thrashing would only rip a gill and leave it – him – bleed out in the water.

“Come in.”

While Elf and Man had often found themselves in each other company (perhaps more than him and his children these past few days), and quite frequently alone, they had kept these meetings on, largely, neutral ground. A meeting tent. The field before Erebor’s gates. The many paths and streets of New Dale.

But not a bedroom. Never a bedroom.

The Elvenking’s tent, when Bard had entered the first and many times following, was absent of a bed, or even a curtained-off section that held the possibility of holding one. At first, he had thought this was on behalf of privacy. Bard didn’t meet others in his bedroom back on the Lake either, when a living room or the front stairs had more than sufficed. But now, as Bard closed the door and watched the Elvenking survey his _bedroom,_ he realised Elves didn’t need a bedroom because they probably didn’t need a bed, or, more importantly, sleep. _Trust Elves to forgo basic necessities that ruled them superior to Men. What will it be next? Food?_

As the Elf turned his gaze to Bard’s bed, crunched at its centre but not pulled back for sleep, the Man felt the hook in his throat twang.

“Well,” he said more to fill the silence than start anything of importance. “I… who’s been telling you I’m unwell?”

The Elf didn’t turn to him as he spoke. Instead, he stepped over to the desk, and with face carefully blank said, “various Elves of my guard. Galion in particular has been especially vocal.”

“I wasn’t aware your Elves paid so much attention to me.”

Finally, the Elf’s gaze turned to him. “I asked him to.”

Bard’s father had warned him once, one day on the Lake when Bard had been too small to properly hold a fishing rod, that fish pulled from the bottom to the surface would experience a painful pressure on their bodies. _That,_ he had said, hands slow as they manipulated Bard’s smaller pair to reel, _is why you must bring them up with care_. Bard, being small and entirely occupied with a passing thrush, had neither understood or believed his father until he’d reached his sixteenth summer. It had been a family heirloom that had fallen out of his arms and sunk under the surface – not the black arrow, thank every God imaginable (Bard refused to imagine what could’ve happened if it had been). Instead, it was only a simple ring, banded with what Bard had once thought to be silver but now understood to be Mithril, with six emeralds embedded within its width. And yet, despite its lowered value by comparison, it was still an heirloom, and after recently losing both his parents to the cold of winter upon the Lake, Bard had found the thought of leaving it lost to him unbearable.

The feeling of swimming to the surface returned to him. The cold ring in his hand, caught in even colder fingers, had held no weight against the sensation of pressure and burning his body had experienced as he fled towards the moonlight, shimmering upon the gorged surface like oil. His lungs, though not as crushed as when he’d reached the bottom of the Lake (thankfully nowhere near as deep as he knew the Lake could become), had screamed with a different sort of urgency. This had been echoed, in his muscles. In his head.

Instead of feeling crushed, Bard had felt as though he were being pulled apart, torn open to reveal an empty inside for the murky water of the Lake to pour into and inhabit.

It was not a feeling Bard had ever wished to re-experience.

And yet there he stood. The eyes of the Elvenking upon him, and the pressure of a reverse-caving threatening to pull open his ribs.

“Did you now,” he murmured.

“He said that your lack of sleep was concerning.” Again, the Elf waved his hand. “I find I much agree with him.”

Bard’s throat was stuffed, and swallowing did little to clear it. “So, you’re here to tell me a bedtime story?” he said somewhat stiffly, cottoned around the corners.

The Elvenking’s eyes turned somewhat humorous. “Perhaps.”

An awkward quiet stretched between them. Bard swallowed, and shifted on his feet.

“Then… tell me a story.”

The Elf sunk, graceful and fluid, into Bard’s desk chair. He appeared at Bard’s desk like a star reflected within the Lake’s surface, a true imaged distorted within an inferior frame, and ultimately, dishonest to its true form. Within the back of his mind, where he put wishes for a finer bed and better food, Bard wondered how the Elvenking would appear within his own realm. Would he appear less… worn? More beautiful in the way that falling leaves and virgin snow on a red morn was?

“Does the… representative of Dale have any requests?” the focus of his thoughts asked.

Bard, without a proper seat to rest upon, stepped to his bed, feet heavy with exhaustion, and sat upon its rumbled blankets. “Tell me about your people. The Elves.”

“Which would you prefer?”

Bard fell against the wall with a short-lived twinge in his shoulder, and frowned. “I… I’m not sure I may myself clear- tell me about your people. The Elves of your land.”

A short, amused confusion lifted from the Elf’s brows. “The Sindar and the Silvans.”

“Like the Dalish and the Rohirrim?”

A chuckle, low like the rolling of thunder in the distance, too far from home to hurt anything but perhaps sensitive ears, escaped thin lips. The Elf smiled. “Not exactly, Bard. The Quendi – the term for all Elves – are… quite separated in more than… township.”

“I fear I may be approaching deeper waters than I can swim, my lord,” Bard muttered.

“Then I will only speak on your desired subject. The Elves under my lordship are of Sindar and Silvan heritage, with some Avari. The Moriquendi – Elves of darkness. None have seen the Divine light, nor do some wish to.”

Bard pushed a pillow against the wall and limped, heavily, into its soft embrace. Some fresh part of him murmured that a _representative_ hosting an ally, a _King_ , should _not_ be lying upon his bed like some tired child. And yet, Bard felt alarmingly similar to one, and pushed that voice away.

“I’m not going to question those parts.”

A smile. “Many consider themselves Silvan, despite their heritage. My son among them. And they could be considered truthful – we have adopted the simpler, Silvan way of life within Greenwood. We only prefer the Sindar ways of governing, among other small things.”

Bard nodded, the lids of his eyes beginning to become heavy. “So… you’re Sindar?”

A nod. “By blood. I was born in Doriath, before it was sunk and ruined. My father Oropher took our people, other Sindar to the wood, and the people already inhabiting what would become Greenwood, the Silvans, welcomed us, and would accept our family as their lords if we only, in turn, adopt their ways.”

“I feel like I’m missing quite a bit here,” Bard mumbled. “Do I want to know?”

The Elf’s grey eyes turned grim, for a moment. “No, nor should you. The consequences of those days are too long behind us to be of concern to mortal Men. These tales should remain as warnings to the Eldar, only.”

The thickness in the air felt suddenly uncomfortable. “Back to the Sindar and the Silvans?”

Thranduil nodded, and the thickness evaporated into an atmosphere Bard most recognised when he taught his children of their heritage. “The Grey Elves and the Green Elves. We enjoy the stars, the darkness, the ground and what the earth gives us. Now, we are a simple people – who like to enjoy ourselves and keep to our own.”

“Except when it concerns the Men of Laketown?”

“Men of Dale,” the Elf supplied. “Our realms were once allied, and I hope we will be once again. We will need to; a shadow approaches.”

Bard paused, stomach tightening. “Another war?”

The Elf turned to him, eyes unshielded and raw, like the thawing of ice over grass in the morn. “I do not have a powerful gift of foresight… but even I can see where this river empties. I… doubt you will be alive, when the shadow falls upon us.” Something within those eyes turned… thoughtful. Sad. “But your influence over Dale’s emergence into Spring following this era of a warring, ruined Winter will alter the outcome significantly.”

“Morbid,” Bard grumbled. Though his mind was too fogged to truly realise the prophecy set before him, it didn’t tie down his tongue. “Is this a Sindar thing, or just you? Being so…”

“Poised?”

“Blunt.”

The Elf smiled, short but deep. “Just me, I believe. My contemporaries are…they lean more towards twisting their words. The Lady of the Golden Wood first among them – though Elrond may be a contender.”

Bard yawned and could not find the will to smother it. “I supposed I’ll meet these Elves eventually? As the King the town so clearly expects me to be?”

The Elf hummed, low and thoughtful. His brow, full and dark, dropped over his eyes. A finger, set with a ring that could’ve bought the entire building glittered in the candlelight, as faint as it was. “Perhaps. Elrond resides far over the mountains, and Galadriel holds little thought for the race of Men. I doubt it.”

“Stuck with you then.”

“And the Dwarves.”

Bard sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Fantastic. Elves and Dwarves at my doorstep.”

Then, there was a comfortable silence.

Sleep curled between Bard’s eyes, spiked and catching on every corner and bump. Like a ball of snow, it rolled, gathered, until either it came to a stop and settled, gently, or hit something and exploded.

“Is there anything else you wish to ask of me, my lord?” the Elf asked, softly. Like moss covering a forest floor.

“Don’t suppose you can put me to sleep with magic, could you?” Bard chuckled, shifting so he could lay across the mattress properly.

“Only if you ask,” the Elvenking replied, standing.

“Oh… then, uh, then I ask?”

The Elf came to stand over him, the candlelight fluttering over his shoulders and catching in his hair. There, it glowed, collapsed within its light, illuminated the curve of his jaw and the intricate stitches of his gown. His eyes, like the last ice over the Lake during the final week of winter, narrowed not in anger, or scrutiny, but in thought. A hand, pale and long, decorated with a multitude of rings, rested itself upon Bard’s brow. There, oddly cool to the touch, it twitched as the Sindar spoke, softly, under his breath. Bard blinked, eyes hazy and barely capturing the image of a rare, unshielded smile –

And Bard knew no more until the rising of the sun the next morn. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I haven't written in a long, long time, let alone published something, and I'm not completely happy with it - but it's a good thing to start the new year with! Happy Holidays to you all!


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